1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to adjusting the playback rate of recorded audio based on the typing speed of a typist transcribing the audio.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is often desirable to transcribe speech into alpha-numeric characters. In this way, the speech can be input into a computer or otherwise reproduced in written form for a variety of purposes.
Conventionally, a typist listens to a recording of a speech and simultaneously transcribes the speech using a typewriter or computer keyboard. As recognized herein, such manual transcription remains common even with the advent of speech recognition devices, since much speech that has been transcribed by a speech recognition device might still require manual editing.
Typically, the typist starts and stops the audio device as necessary to keep up with the audio, since the typist ordinarily types at a speed that is independent of the playback rate of the audio. Consequently, a slow typist must continually start and stop the audio, which is cumbersome, inefficient, and annoying, while a fast typist must wait for the audio and thus be forced to slow an otherwise fast and efficient typing speed down to the playback rate of the audio. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that different speakers can speak at different rates.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,207,440 and 4,075,435 disclose methods for dictation machine playback control. Unfortunately, neither of these inventions makes the critical observation that audio playback rate can be automatically and dynamically established based on actual typing speed. U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,060 (and other related patents, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,076,059, 5,333,275, and 5,136,655) provide aligning speech to text but do not consider adapting speech playback rate to typing rate. Also, the above-noted patents require an existing text transcript, which might not be present in the cases considered herein.
The present invention has considered the above problem of recorded audio not being played at the rate at which a user transcribes it, and has made the critical observation that it would be beneficial to automatically establish the audio playback rate based on the actual speed at which a typist transcribes it.